The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on February 5, 2015, that InterVarsity Christian Fellowship could not be sued for firing a “ministerial employee,” despite being accused of discriminatory treatment. A female spiritual director at InterVarsity was placed on paid leave in 2011 after telling her boss that she was contemplating divorcing her husband. When she did not reconcile with him, she was eventually fired. In 2013 she filed a lawsuit claiming sex discrimination in her termination, alleging that two male employees at InterVarsity in analogous circumstances had not been fired.

The appeals court decision in favor of InterVarsity is based on the precedent of the 2012 Hosanna-Tabor Supreme Court ruling. In this unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment’s religion clauses create a nearly absolute right for churches and similar religious organizations to select and fire their religious leaders without being subjected to nondiscrimination laws or second-guessing by the courts. In this case, the Supreme Court held that a school teacher with some religious duties in a church-related school was a ministerial employee and could not challenge the school’s decision to fire her. The “ministerial exception” is a court-created right, based on the First Amendment.

Most employees of faith-based organizations are not “ministerial.” Nevertheless, because of the religious-organization exemption in the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s Title VII, which prohibits employment discrimination, a religious employer may consider religion when deciding who to hire and fire. That freedom to consider religion extends to decisions about any and all staff, CEO to janitor, but it does not justify job discrimination based on sex, race, age, or other characteristics.

The ministerial exception is far broader-a kind of super right that the courts have determined is required by the Constitution’s protection of the freedom of religious organizations. It protects their choice of religious or ministerial leaders, notwithstanding limitations in nondiscrimination law. The only way to keep the government from wrongly second-guessing or steering those crucial leadership decisions is to insulate the decisions from government rules and court lawsuits.

In the InterVarsity case, the appeals court ruled that the decision to fire the employee could not be challenged under federal or state nondiscrimination laws because InterVarsity is a religious employer and the fired employee filled a “ministerial” role. As in the Hosanna-Tabor case, the court here found that although the employee did not have the formal title of “minister,” her role was ministerial in fact and did not need to be labeled as such. In ringing terms, the Sixth Circuit court proclaimed that there is no instance in American history where the government required a religious organization to preserve in a ministerial position an employee that the organization no longer believed was appropriate for the tasks of ministry. Quite the opposite, the court said: “The historical practice has always been that the government cannot dictate to a religious organization who its spiritual leaders should be.”

Further, the Six Circuit Court of Appeals held that the ministerial exception is so fundamental that it applies even if the religious organization has made no big deal about it. The InterVarsity decision is highly significant because it upholds the core principle that, in a pluralist society, it is not the role of government to select who may or may not serve as a minister or a religious leader for any faith. In a statement to Christianity Today, InterVarsity stated that the court’s decision “confirms that distinctive legal identity of religious organizations consistently expressed in our country’s history […] We have a long track record of valuing the role of women and men in Christian ministry. In this situation, InterVarsity believes it made every effort to resolve differences in perspective with appropriate grace and respect.”

While the religious employment decisions typically made by faith-based organizations are grounded in the religious-organization exemption of Title VII, and not in the court-created “ministerial exception” at stake in this InterVarsity case, every court decision that upholds the freedom of religious organizations to select their leaders based on their own criteria helps to strengthen the religious staffing rights of every faith-based organization.